


relic

by rukafais



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, hello im here for all your robotfic needs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-30
Updated: 2016-05-30
Packaged: 2018-07-11 03:42:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7027063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rukafais/pseuds/rukafais
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something wakes up, all by itself, knowing nothing.</p><p>What does one alone become?</p>
            </blockquote>





	relic

Birds don’t know anything about war.

Well, that’s a lie. They do, but only in the abstract; sound, light, fire. The intricacies of conflict are lost on them, are foreign to them. Birds don’t think about starting wars with other birds.

Birds have enough to worry about in their lives as it is.

\-----

It isn’t a question that comes up often. But every once in a while, someone will ask:

_“Did they know?”_

And of course, it’s rebutted almost instantly. Of course they knew. If they didn’t know, they wouldn’t have targeted humans, destroyed things built by human hands. Wouldn’t have marched on human countries without a word.

It was a nightmare, a fancy of sci-fi enthusiasts, made real.

But the question still remains, somewhere.

_Did they know?_

\-----

Bastion unit, Siege Automaton E54, doesn’t know a lot. They know their serial number (E54), their date of manufacture (somewhere within the last decade), the current status of all their parts (in bad shape), the way a human would know how to breathe and blink and check their body over.

The amount of things they know about anything else 

_(including why they woke up all of a sudden, flowers sprouting from their insides, alerts blaring feebly in their processor, pain riddling their body)_

can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

The place in which they succumbed to their injuries is overgrown, ruined, a complete mess. Any alerts they could still send sound on dead channels, a graveyard of static and radio silence.

(They try anyway, not knowing what else to do. That first day of awakening is mostly spent on this exercise in futility, distress signals to something that will never pick up again.

They don’t understand why that is, but what they do learn, very quickly, is that nothing is going to assist them.

Whatever they need to do, they have to do by themselves.)

There are other omnics here, shattered and broken. Overgrown like they were. They open up communications, wait patiently for these others to come online, like they did.

E54 waits, ignoring all other stimuli. Drags them into the pools of light filtering down through the canopy, pulls roots and greenery from their bodies, exposes their sensors to the pale autumn sun. Shakes them as if to jog them into activation. Beeps to them, cycling through all the simple queries that have survived the degradation of their memory, waiting for an answer. 

No answer comes. None wake. 

Autumn passes into winter. Snow drifts down from the world outside, covering E54 and the bodies of the other omnics like a white blanket.

Later, the snow melts from the heat of what engines still work inside E54.

Snow piles higher on the others, a freezing blanket of white. They show no signs of waking up.

They feel heavy inside. No matter what they do, trying to shake it off, that feeling remains.

They don’t understand it.

(Lesson one: You are alone.)

\----

Birdsong is in the air. Flowers bloom. Small animals come out of hiding. Spring is here, at last.

E54 sparks with light, putting themselves back together, coming alive with the world around them.

(For reasons they cannot comprehend, despite the fact they are still in pain and in desperate need of repair, they shy away from touching the bodies of those who are still mostly intact, those they held vigil over in the long winter.)

They crawl, at first, joints rusted over with disuse and marred by injury. They drag themselves from spot to spot within their self-contained world, digging with a gun they no longer remember how to use, unearthing resources they _can_ use to repair themselves. They tear apart guns and press together parts into the right configurations, trying to remember a precision they can no longer manage.

_There is a fragment of memory data that remains; white-hot sparks as they’re put together, a voice that resonates down to their core. The humming of others, just like them._

It hurts, repairing themselves, but doesn’t everything? It can’t possibly hurt any more than it did when they woke up.

\-------

A bird sings in the trees that have grown up around the ruins, loud and high. It’s a day like any other, and birds like this have come and gone, been born and grown and flown from the nest; it’s nothing special.

But.

E54 looks up from their digging; waits for the sound to happen again. It does; the bird calls once, twice, three times.

The omnic responds. Once, twice, three times; a loud, high note that sounds more like a screech than a birdcall.

There is a flash of yellow, twittering among the branches. It hops to and fro, as if trying to decide whether to come down.

E54 tries again to imitate the bird’s calls, straining what little vocal capability they have, watching it with a kind of strange desperation. Their head swivels as it flutters here and there, flies in a circle high above, drifts downward with its wings beating slow;

it lands on their shoulder with a chirp, a trill, the beginnings of a song. 

As the days go by, it watches them dig and pull themselves back together, piece by piece. It never seems to get bored of the omnic.

As the days go by, E54 learns how to better mimic the bird’s calls. The bird, similarly, sings to them, unafraid.

Birds don’t care about wars.

(Lesson two: You don’t have to be alone.)

\-------

Spring turns over into summer; the amount of daylight increases and the ambient temperature rises.

E54 takes shaky steps on newly-repaired limbs, and feels the urge to seek out a better source of sunlight; they push aside greenery, step over roots, their movements becoming surer and stronger as they test their range of motion.

They emerge, and their world is - expanded.

It’s a pleasant morning; birds sing in the trees, the wind stirs the long grass. Sunlight glints off metal in the fields, paints the distant trees bright colours; nobody has walked here in a long time.

Their nameless, feathered companion rides on their shoulder, singing. It’s always the same tune.

But that’s good, because E54 finds it easy to learn. Their voice rises and falls, trilling, beeping, singing along. 

They haven’t found a name. They don’t remember their purpose; they don’t know what the world thinks of them. They have simple desires that they’re unable to articulate clearly, even to themselves; they know only that going somewhere they have no data on is a much more attractive prospect, suddenly. They want it more than anything else they have wanted in their short life.

The amount of things E54 knows about anything else is still not very much. 

But what they _do_ know, now, 

(about animals, flowers, trees; about a strange, heavy feeling they don’t know what to do with yet; about birds and birdsong)

can no longer be counted on the fingers of just one hand.

(Lesson three: there's always more to learn.)


End file.
